Each quarter, the company gives out an Environmental Sustainability Action Award, along with a donation to an environmental charity of the winner’s choice, in recognition of an employee or team who has shown leadership, exemplifying how Microsoft and its employees can have a positive impact on the environment. These leaders help us improve not only the way we run our business, but also the ways our products and services can make a difference for our customers, partners and society.

The award for Microsoft’s second quarter (which runs from October to December) has been given to Ludgero Gameiro, a Technical Account Manager in Portugal. Ludgero created a new offering to help customers define power management policies using System Center Configuration Manager—a great example of how technology can increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions and decrease costs.

Last week Microsoft Research’s Drew Purves published an article in Nature (paid access) about how computer modeling can help map the planet’s ecosystems and better understand threats to biodiversity; we blogged about the article in this post. Today our friends over at ClimateDesk published a video interview with Drew that explains in 90 seconds how computer models can predict the impact of climate change. Check it out!

In his second inaugural address, President Obama gave prominent attention to the threat of climate change. Washington Post’s Wonkblog offered a detailed look on how climate factored in the President’s speech, which explains how the nation should confront global warming. Despite promising rhetoric following his first inauguration in 2009, many climate advocates were underwhelmed by climate policy during the past four years. That’s one reason why GreenBiz called out the need for leadership from the executive branch on climate policy in its analysis of the inaugural speech. In his analysis, author David Bartlett explains that while the challenge of limiting climate change is clear, IT and communication technology can have very impressive results on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental sustainability is at the core of our businesses practices around the world. As we strive to reduce the impact of our own operations and products, green efforts made by our offices around the world are helping us elevate our position as a sustainability leader in the global technology sector.

Earlier this month Microsoft’s India offices participated in Green Office Week, which included four days of presentations on everyday actions Microsoft India employees could take to contribute to the company’s sustainability efforts. The week culminated with employees making ‘green’ resolutions for the coming year.

What if there was a giant computer model that could dramatically enhance our understanding of the environment and lead to policy decisions that better support conservation and biodiversity? A team of researchers at Microsoft Research are building just such a model that one day may eventually do just that, and have published an article today in Nature (paid access) arguing for other scientists to get on board and try doing the same.

When Drew Purves, head of Microsoft’s Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group (CEES) and his colleagues at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, United Kingdom, began working with the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC), they didn’t know they would end up modeling life at global scales. “UNEP-WCMC is an international hub of important conservation activity, and we were pretty open-minded about exactly what we might do together,” says Purves. But they quickly realized that what was really needed was a general ecosystem model (GEM) – something that hasn’t been possible to date because of the vast scale involved. In turn, findings from a GEM could contribute to better informed policy decisions about biodiversity.